Twitter Turns Its Tweet Firehose On For Saleforce’s Radian6 In New Enterprise Deal

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As enterprise companies like Salesforce and Oracle continue to sharpen their social media services for enterprises, Twitter is locking arms with one of them in a strategic alliance. Radian6, the social media monitoring service bought by Salesforce in March 2011 for $326 million, has announced that it has signed a strategic alliance with Twitter that gives Radian6 customers “complete access” to Twitter’s public tweet firehose of more than 400 million tweets per day.

This looks to be the first deal of this kind between Twitter and a third party Radian6 to allow full access for enterprise services. (But this is not the first enterprise deal for Twitter: for example, partnerships with DataSift and Gnip resell percentages of Twitter data, a Twitter spokesperson tells me. Crimson Hexagon and Mass Relevance also use Twitter’s firehose.) Twitter has had other firehose deals before, too, that have come and gone, such as this one with Google.

Financial terms of this deal were not disclosed by the companies, but chances are that given that the firehose access will be resold on to business users, it may be more than a simple API deal. Salesforce has more than 100,000 customers, it says.

The two have worked together before — for example, last year Twitter selected Radian6 to provide analysis of the first-ever Town Hall meeting at the White House, by analyzing questions and conversations around the #AskObama hashtag.

The agreement will serve to beef up Salesforce’s social media cred at a time when it is competing against Oracle to show themselves to be responsive and on top of one of the biggest developments in communications, which has largely developed as a consumer-led, viral phenomenon — and one that businesses have often found themselves flummoxed to control (the McDonalds tweets earlier this year is one case that comes to mind).

“The alliance between Twitter and salesforce.com enables companies to apply the power of social listening and engagement to over 400 million Tweets daily, providing opportunities for social enterprises to engage, solve problems, gain followers and build brand identity,” Marcel LeBrun, SVP and GM for Salesforce Radian6, said in a statement.

Salesforce offers a number of social media services, including private social networks; social networks between business and its customers; and social outreach with Heroku and Radian6.

Oracle and Salesforce seem to be swapping social media headlines at the moment. Last week, Oracle unveiled a revamped cloud computing strategy in which it put one of its latest social media acquisitions, social media marketer Vitrue, which it bought for $300 million in May, as a centerpiece of that plan.

What’s not clear yet is if this is an exclusive deal, or if Twitter will make the rounds to Oracle next.

Twitter doesn’t necessarily imply more deals won’t be out of the question as it continues to build out revenue-generating services.

“Companies look to Twitter to connect with their customers in real time about the things that matter to them. Salesforce.com understands how to facilitate these interactions,” said Jana Messerschmidt, vice president of Business Development at Twitter, in a statement.

We’ll update this story as we learn more.

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CrunchBase

OverviewSalesforce Radian6 helps companies listen to what people are saying about them online and engage in those conversations across the social web. From blogs and comments to multimedia, boards, forums and communities like Twitter, Radian6 gathers the discussions happening online and gives businesses the ability to analyze, manage, track, and report on their social media monitoring and engagement efforts.
Radian6 …

OverviewSalesforce is an enterprise cloud computing company that provides business software on a subscription basis. The company is best known for its on-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions.
Salesforce was founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, and went public in June 2004. Salesforce has been a pioneer in developing enterprise platforms through its innovative AppExchange …